Why sport?

Freshmen basketball player, Lauren Hill, of Mount St. Joseph's College, has incurable brain cancer and has months to live.  On November 2, 2014, she played in a college game and scored the first basket of the game.  Lauren has taken on the mission of increasing cancer awareness, and raising money for research.   Her attitude is admirable - she has willed herself to focus on something positive out of a tragic situation.  My thoughts go to her and her family.

Though this story is a bit of a tangent for this blog, the story spurred me to think about sport and the role it plays in contemporary US society.  Why sport in a time of difficulty?  For Lauren, the answer is simple.  It was her dream to play college basketball, and she was thrilled to do it and raise attention for a worthy cause.  She was heartened by the support.

One of the things that sport does is to literally bring people together - as in the same building.  In this case, people showed up to support a young woman's dream and a young woman's cause.  The game was attended by over 10,000 fans who filled Xavier University's basketball arena in Cincinnati. In the US, sporting events and major pop music concerts are two events that can reliably bring people to share the same physical, and often psychic/emotional space.  Sport can offer a forum to express some of our thoughts and emotions.

How else could 10,000 people show up to support a person, or a cause, in a clear way?  I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but it's a reality of the culture we live in.  Sport reflects and inspires all sorts of human behavior ranging from greed and arrogance to achievement and self-sacrifice.  Stories like this show the good that sport can help bring out. Thank you Lauren.

The Effectiveness of a Football (Soccer) Manager and Hope for the Cubs?

ESPN writer, Gabrielle Marcotti, wrote this article about the role of the manager in top level European soccer.  His thesis is this:  There is no objective, analytic way to judge a manager, and therefore, hiring and firing is done on reputation (self-promotion and PR) and has more than a little bit to do with timing and luck.  He uses the examples of Jose Mourinho, the self-appointed Special One, and David Moyes, the failed successor to the extremely successful Alex Ferguson, at Manchester United.

Marcotti's argument is consistent with the view of the book, Soccernomics, (earlier version reviewed here) written by a sports economist - Stefan Szymanski and a journalist - Simon Kuper.  The book self-admittedly takes cues from baseball's Moneyball - which is basically an ode to using statistics to evaluate sporting performance.  Statistical analysis in football is difficult since there are few discrete, objective data points (ie goals scored), but they argue that the wages of a team are the best indicator of success with coaching/managing accounting for a small fragment - though they do cite a few notable exceptions to the rule - thus, implicitly backing Mourinho's self-styled moniker, the Special One.  They found that about 10% of managers actually overachieve - in other words, their teams did better than their wages would suggest (2012, p. 114).

This makes me wonder if Joe Maddon will be able to improve the lot of the Chicago Cubs.   He was hired by General Manager, and analytics acolyte, Theo Epstein.  According to the New York Times, "Maddon was the ideal fit, open to ideas from the analytics-minded front office and popular with players for cultivating a loose clubhouse atmosphere while thriving on competing with the payroll behemoths" (full article here).

What Cubs fans really want to know is,  will he get the Cubs to overachieve, or at least achieve up to their payroll?  Is he the exorcist needed to rid the curse of the Billy Goat, and win the World Series?  If he does, we know he will get the credit, but we won't probably know if it was the analytics, or the 'loose clubhouse' that got them there, or just luck.  Cubs fans won't care.